V5 Digital Uses a Chatbot to Boost Entrepo Finance’s Customer Experience.

Entrepo Finance, a major Namibian lender offering loans to all permanently employed Government employees, was seeking ways to delight its clients, to make its service as efficient as possible, and to grow its customer base. V5 Digital, the leading Namibian digital agency, helped realize this vision by creating a brand new website with the introduction of a chatbot called Yola on the lender’s brand new website – designed and developed by the V5 Digital Team. What lay behind the decision to install a chatbot, and why was this the correct route to support Entrepo Finance in achieving its objectives?

Entrepo Finance and V5 Digital team celebrating the launch of their new Entrepo website.

Evidence globally reveals that the outlook of chatbots is overwhelmingly positive. As the Ottawa Business journal reports: “Every bank that has launched a program based on an AI chatbot has achieved great success in one sphere or another. Many banks tell about outstanding results that have been possible only because of bots.”

So what exactly is a chatbot? The journal defines a chatbot as “a conversational marketing tool that automates either textual or voice conversations with end-users. Instead of messaging with a support agent, a customer can engage with a chatbot to receive instantaneous replies based on user inputs. Sophisticated algorithms combined with user data ensure the outputs are as personalized as possible.”

Customers today are expecting – and often demanding – not only consultations at any time of day, but also personal assistance. They’ve had annoying and frustrating experiences with long waits on the phone to call centers when they wanted fast answers. And banks have had to recruit many new call center agents, which has resulted in having to pay more staff members, and having to provide training for every new employee.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots have changed that. What they offer is 24/7 availability. Moreover, as Bizcommunity reports: “they’re never rude, tired or irritated. This is why chatbots are prevalent in customer service-related industries”. Furthermore, customer queues are eliminated and chatbots provide a uniform standard of excellent service.

Clients want to interact with their lender instantly - 24/7 - and not have to endure hours of waiting for a call center agent to attend to their queries

Yola, the chatbot which V5 Digital installed on the Entrepo Finance website, performs a range of tasks from answering basic questions such as operating hours, to initiating the process of applying for a loan.

Using chatbots not only improves customer service, but the savings in time and money are monumental. According to Juniper Research, “Automated customer experiences in banking and finance are expected to save the industry $7.3 billion by 2023. The equivalent time saved by banks is approximately 862 million hours.” A chatbot can handle thousands of queries at once, whereas humans can only handle one query at any time. And with the chatbot filtering requests, the human support team is not overloaded.

Clients want to interact with their lender instantly - 24/7 - and not have to endure hours of waiting for a call center agent to attend to their queries. Chatbots are becoming ubiquitous across most industries since they can offer first rate customer service.

Some of the top industries currently benefiting from chatbots are retail, insurance, healthcare, hospitality, tourism, finance, and even government. For example, a chatbot called Hipmunk will help users find and book their vacation. It will ask you questions to find out what sort of holiday you’re looking for, and will use your phone’s location to find out where you’re departing from. A review of Hipmunk concludes: “It’s a great way to cut down on what can be a laborious search across multiple sites. Condensing your entire vacation search to one, highly engaging channel is – for people like me – a life saver. “

And there’s much more: the range of activities that can be performed by chatbots enhanced with AI extends to other fields in addition to basic transactions and answering queries. For example, financial service providers can use chatbots to support areas such as data security, fraud detection and wealth management.

In fact, V5 Digital is poised to implement a new phase of Yola’s functionality in Entrepo Finance, which will take the customer service to the next level by providing customers with instant affordability assessments. The lender has joined the ranks of cutting-edge global banking by using one of the most effective technological solutions available today.

Don’t hesitate to contact V5 Digital for a free non-obligation quote to find out how your business can benefit from a new, customer focused website with integrated chatbot.

Managing a crisis with email signatures and email banners.

The Complete Guide.

Crisis management is a key part of any successful digital strategy. And everyday business email is your most used communication channel. So how can you best use email signatures and email banners to make your everyday employee email a highly effective crisis management tool? COVID-19 – the global Corona virus pandemic – has thrown this into sharp focus for all of us. You’ve assessed the impact on your business. You’ve developed your prevention plan and key message. Now you need to communicate it clearly to inform, reassure and engage your stakeholders – your customers, staff, partners, suppliers and others.

What makes email signatures and banner campaigns effective in a crisis? Rapid reaction speed. When a crisis moves fast you need to update your messages immediately. Central email signature and banner control means company-wide updates can be made in an instant, keeping your business on top of any evolving crisis.

Immediate Impact. Your message needs to cut through the noise of a crisis. An eye-catching banner at the top of each email ensures immediate attention. Urgent engagement. You want immediate interaction but don’t want to add to any panic. Clear, concise copy and a compelling call-to-action on your banner will directly engage your audience and get them clicking through to your detailed prevention plan.

Every email opened. Maximize the chances of your prevention plan and instructions being read. With a crisis email banner campaign you’re communicating your prevention plan with every email you send and, because it’s everyday business email, it’s always opened. Central brand control. To manage a crisis, it’s vital to have clear, unified, branded messages across your business’s employee emails. Centrally-controlled email signatures and banner campaigns guarantee all your staff are on-brand and on-message – presenting a united front.

Target key messaging. Target key stakeholder segments with banner messaging – and links to content – that really matters to them. Reassure them all you have a prevention plan in place. Give customers information on closures, refunds and/or future deals, provide partners with tips on doing business during the crisis, and direct suppliers to updated access and order details.

Internal staff engagement. Use training banners on your internal email to direct staff to your prevention plan training content and track their engagement. It’s essential that all staff understand their role in your crisis management plan, especially those in customer facing-roles.

Disclaimers. Don’t underestimate the legal and compliance implications of a crisis. Remember to review your email disclaimer in consultation with your company’s legal department. Again, use central control to ensure the right disclaimer appears on every employee’s email.

Track engagement. Check who is actively engaging with your prevention plan with key email banner click-through metrics. Real-time click alerts show you exactly who is engaging and enables targeted follow-up where required. Look to the future. As well as informing and reassuring, use your email banners to keep your business moving forward. Feature your latest promotions and advance purchase deals, – including on CRM-generated response emails – to help secure your pipeline and continue converting customers.

And when the crisis is over… Well, that’s when email banner campaigns make the perfect channel to put your brand and business back on track promoting your newest products, latest offers and company news – all geared to driving direct engagement. Email signatures and email banner campaigns make a highly effective crisis management tool. Email banner campaigns add reach, impact, flexibility and interactive, track-able engagement to your strategy, whilst centralized control lets you inform and reassure your stakeholders with complete brand consistency.

Crisis Management Summary This is a uniquely difficult time for businesses across the globe. Rest assured that we’re still fully operational, albeit remote, and ready to assist with your needs. We can assist with banners for governmental departments and crisis management professionals, as well as all customers who would like to create crisis management campaigns.

This article was originally published by Rocketseed.

V5 Digital is the official Rocketseed Partner for Namibia. Book a demo with us today, and unlock the power of email signature marketing!

Digital Marketing Trends in 2020

Online marketing used to be a new and different way to market. It opened up a new form of media where an effectively executed marketing and advertising campaign can help businesses peddle goods and services they offer and increase the demand for them.

In just a few decades, digital marketing became a more integral part of the business. Businesses began changing their business model to an online one or beefing up their current marketing efforts with digital marketing strategies to try to capture a growing and lucrative online marketplace.

Since then, the influence of the digital landscape has grown as times changed. Digital marketing is a constantly evolving landscape with ever-changing trends and new technologies. Consumer interests and behaviors have also become more difficult to predict. An out-of-place digital marketing trend will limit your brand in both reach and repetition.

Marketers can no longer pretend that the changing marketing trends can’t affect them while sticking to making educated guesses, and following ancient methods will be valid forever. While your blissfully unaware of new marketing trends, your competition can amplify their existing marketing strategies and attract more audience.

As the only thing making a difference between a successfully thriving business and a failed one, marketers should easily adapt to emerging technologies and always stay ahead of the game. This will ensure that you’d gain a competitive edge while being able to grow your business, generate leads and further enhance the relationship with their existing customers.

To give you more insights, here are the key takeaways of the infographic below which details the top trends in digital marketing one should keep a close eye on in 2020:

1. The rise and domination of Artificial Intelligence

2. Omnichannel engagements will be the norm

3. Emails become more polished and more interactive

4. Sentiment analysis and social listening will be used more extensively

5. Customer engagements will be more conversational

6. Marketing to generation Z in their own language

7. The continuous rise of immersive technologies and augmented reality (AR)

8. The emergence of augmented and predictive analytics

9. The dawn of neuromarketing

As a new year starts, you can expect trends to change once again. Most of the upcoming trends for this year focuses on technology and personalization. This infographic by Digital Marketing Philippines elaborates on the digital trends to look out for in 2020.

Article adapted from an author named Jomer Gregorio from Business 2 Community - leading industry publication.

As one of the leading digital marketing agencies in Windhoek, Namibia, V5 Digital can help you advise and adapt these trends to your company. Contact us to discover how you can harness the power of Digital Marketing Trends in 2020.